Government funds rural ambulance drug clot trial

The State Government will fund a trial of blood-clot dissolving drugs in rural ambulances.

The Government is committing $21.9 million over four years towards cardio health measures in next Tuesday's budget.

Part of the money will be used to equip ambulances in one Victorian region, possibly Gippsland, with the drug in the next financial year.

The trial will then be rolled out across all regional areas.

It is estimated 20 people die every day in Victoria from heart disease.

It is the cause of one-fifth of all deaths and is higher in regional areas.

Ambulance Victoria chief Greg Sassella has welcomed the funding.

"The paramedics will be beside themselves," he said.

Linda Edge, who lives on a farming property at Casterton, in western Victoria, owes her life to the clot busting drugs.

Ms Edge, who is in her fifties, went to the Hamilton Hospital Emergency department when she was feeling fatigued with back pains and a sense of dread.

Doctors told her she was having a heart attack after a number of tests over several days.

"In Melbourne, I would've been taken straight through," Ms Edge said.

"I would've had the stress test. If I'd failed, I would've had an angiogram. I would've gone in, I wouldn't have had to wait."

Ms Edge paid tribute to staff at the hospital but said things were different in regional areas.

"There was only one ambulance in Hamilton at that time, but luckily we got it," she said.

"The air ambulance or the helicopter was unavailable. So they gave me the clot-busting drugs and we waited for the ambulance."

Ms Edge said it then took more five hours to get to Geelong, because her ambulance was forced to stop for an hour to attend to a critically-injured car crash victim.

She said the anti-clotting drugs were vital to her survival.

"That was a really traumatic experience," she said.

"You hear of people who have heart attacks. You think you're going to die."

Heart maps

The Heart Foundation has also released a report on heart attack hot spots, based on five years of government data.

The Victorian heart maps show 36 of 48 local government areas in regional Victoria have higher than average hospitalisation rates from heart attacks.

The top five hotspots are the Central Goldfields, Towong, Pyrenees, Yarriambiack and the Southern Grampians.

The Heart Foundation's Kellie-Ann Jolly says the maps were prepared because they were concerned about the high incidence of heart disease in rural areas.

"Even though we've made significant headway in increasing survival rates, particularly in heart attack, it still does remain the biggest killer of men and women," she said.

"We want to encourage decision makers both at the state and local level to use it to plan and decide which systems, treatments, services, and prevention activities and initiatives will be most effective."

While the foundation found rural and regional rates of heart disease were largely affected by having fewer services available, high rates in metropolitan Melbourne were more to do with socio-economic conditions.

Greater Dandenong, Hume, Wyndham, Melton, and Brimbank were among the areas with the highest rates of heart disease.

The lowest rates were recorded in Melbourne's inner-east, and bayside suburbs.